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拍品專文
Painted in 2007—the year of a major retrospective of his career held at the Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia, Rome and the Rotonda della Basana, Milan—the present work is a monumental self-portrait by Julian Schnabel. The picture is almost three metres in height and presented in an ornately carved wooden artist’s frame. Schnabel stands before us at life-sized scale, wearing a black robe and brandishing his brush in prophetic stance. The background is striped with bold strokes of deep blue and white, recalling the dramatic skies painted by the Spanish Renaissance artist El Greco: Schnabel has mixed resin into the paint, creating a gleaming, liquid surface.
Schnabel rose to acclaim as the figurehead of the Neo-Expressionist movement that took New York by storm in the late 1970s and 1980s. Throwing off the formal restraints of the Minimalist and Conceptual art that had prevailed in the previous decade, these artists—others included Francesco Clemente and David Salle—painted vivid, colourful figurative works that plundered art history and clashed imagery in sometimes provocative ways. The loudest and most lauded among the group, Schnabel’s early innovation was to paint on smashed plates fixed to vast wooden supports, creating a ground for painting that conveyed the fractured nature of contemporary life. Unapologetically brash and ambitious, he worked on a consistently operatic scale, fusing the physical grandeur of Abstract Expressionism with the muscular heft of Baroque and Renaissance painting.
As well as broken crockery, Schnabel has painted on wood, velvet and tarpaulin and used media including oil, wax, emulsion and plaster. The present work belongs to an extensive group of portraits—exhibited for the first time in 1997 at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and later New York—which combine resin and oil paint. They depict the artist himself, his family and his friends, among them the painter Albert Oehlen, in a manner that recalls the full-length portraiture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The glossy resin contributes to their Old Masterly air, but also adds a deliberate material challenge for the artist. ‘Sometimes he “complicates” his task by using resin or limiting himself to painting with his hands’, notes Robert Fleck. ‘… He puts himself in predicaments that compel visual inventiveness to achieve the final painting’ (R. Fleck, ‘a painter’s response to these times’, in Julian Schnabel: Malerei / Paintings 1978-2003, exh. cat. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt 2004, p. 55). In the present work, Schnabel emerges triumphant from another battle with his medium, standing—messianic and lavishly framed—in a world of his own making.
Schnabel rose to acclaim as the figurehead of the Neo-Expressionist movement that took New York by storm in the late 1970s and 1980s. Throwing off the formal restraints of the Minimalist and Conceptual art that had prevailed in the previous decade, these artists—others included Francesco Clemente and David Salle—painted vivid, colourful figurative works that plundered art history and clashed imagery in sometimes provocative ways. The loudest and most lauded among the group, Schnabel’s early innovation was to paint on smashed plates fixed to vast wooden supports, creating a ground for painting that conveyed the fractured nature of contemporary life. Unapologetically brash and ambitious, he worked on a consistently operatic scale, fusing the physical grandeur of Abstract Expressionism with the muscular heft of Baroque and Renaissance painting.
As well as broken crockery, Schnabel has painted on wood, velvet and tarpaulin and used media including oil, wax, emulsion and plaster. The present work belongs to an extensive group of portraits—exhibited for the first time in 1997 at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and later New York—which combine resin and oil paint. They depict the artist himself, his family and his friends, among them the painter Albert Oehlen, in a manner that recalls the full-length portraiture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The glossy resin contributes to their Old Masterly air, but also adds a deliberate material challenge for the artist. ‘Sometimes he “complicates” his task by using resin or limiting himself to painting with his hands’, notes Robert Fleck. ‘… He puts himself in predicaments that compel visual inventiveness to achieve the final painting’ (R. Fleck, ‘a painter’s response to these times’, in Julian Schnabel: Malerei / Paintings 1978-2003, exh. cat. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt 2004, p. 55). In the present work, Schnabel emerges triumphant from another battle with his medium, standing—messianic and lavishly framed—in a world of his own making.